were asking him.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled inadequately, trying to remember how he’d got into the position of agreeing to help her. ‘Does that write off the magazine article as well?’
‘No, it only slows that down too.’ Her mind did not accommodate the idea of failure. ‘But I’ve been doing quite a lot of background research on it.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, I went to see the old lady who ran his stage school, that sort of thing.’ A firm reminder to Charles that that was his next priority. He started to make leaving noises, but did not escape without the final rap over the knuckles. ‘I’m very disappointed in you, Charles. I was relying on you. Now I’ll have to try my own more direct methods.’
Maybe it was the meeting with Suzanne that decided Charles to present himself at the Ellen da Costa Stage School in the guise of a journalist, or maybe it was just the obvious role to take when seeking information. Some inner warning mechanism told him not to go as Charles Paris.
There were some good old-clothes shops near the station in Brighton and he had kitted himself out well. The suit was cheaply cut, but looked newish, and the tie was a touch of psychedelic bravado, too young for its wearer and too old to be fashionable. His hair was greyed and Brylcreemed back like raked grass. A pair of pebble glasses changed the shape of his face and made seeing almost impossible. He stained two fingers of his right hand yellow and bought a packet of cigarettes. He didn’t shave and rubbed a little Leichner No. 16 on to darken his jowl. Then an unfamiliar after-shave to cover the grease-paint smell.
He studied the effect in the mirror and thought he looked sufficiently anonymous. The face that looked back at him was like a child’s Potato Man, random features stuck on to a vegetable. He adopted a slightly hunched stance, as if shrinking from the cold. It looked all right.
‘Now just a name and a voice. He fabricated Frederick Austick from the names of the first two victims of the accidents, then decided it was too obvious and amended it to Alfred Bostock. Despite temptations to go fancy or double-barrelled, he stuck at that. He tried a few words in his Moby Dick voice (‘Allegorically inconsistent’ — Coventry Evening Telegraph), but was more satisfied with the one he’d used as Bernard in Everything in the Garden (‘Authentic suburban twang’ — Surrey Comet).
He didn’t really know who he was disguising himself from — the rest of the Lumpkin! company were rehearsing on the Wednesday morning — but as usual he felt more able to cope with a difficult task in character.
The Ellen da Costa Stage School had closed some years before, but its principal still lived in the building (and still kept her hand in by giving elocution lessons to the young people of Brighton who had impediments or social aspirations). The school was a tall Victorian private house off one of the sea-front squares. Its owner’s reduced circumstances were indicated by the cluster of tenants’ doorbells attached with varying degrees of permanency to the old front door frame. Charles pressed the one whose plastic window showed a copperplate ‘Ellen da Costa’ cut from a visiting card.
She answered promptly, a long gaunt lady in black, whose flowing dress and shawl combined with a tangle of hanging beads to make her look like a bentwood hat stand. Her hair was swept back in flamenco dancer style, as if to justify her Spanish surname, but the white line at the roots gave the lie to its sleek blackness. The skin of her face was drawn tight over her cheekbones, as if, like the hair, its tension was maintained by the system of asymmetrical combs at the back of the head. She was made up with skill, but a skill which belonged to an earlier age and survives now only in opera.
But she had style and must once have been a beautiful woman. Though probably seventy, she behaved with the assurance of a woman who has no doubt of her sexual magnetism. There was no coquetry, but a grace and dignity, heightened by her theatrical manner.
‘Good morning,’ she enunciated with the attention to each vowel and consonant which she had instilled into generations of young hopefuls.
‘Hello, I’m Alfred Bostock.’ He slipped easily into his Everything in the Garden twang. ‘I’m a journalist. I’m researching an article on Christopher Milton and I’m here because I’ve heard that you had so much to do with shaping his early career.’
She laughed a clear, tinkling laugh, only shown to be staged by the over-dramatic intake of breath which followed it. ‘Ah, dear Christopher. Everyone wants to know about him.’
‘Other members of the Press, you mean?’
‘Yes, dear boy. There was the cub from the local rag, then a charming American girl, and now you.’
‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind going over the ground again.’
‘Mind? But, mon cher, I am always delighted to speak about my little ones. And when it is the one, the one of all others who had the je ne sais quoi, the unknowable something that is stardom, why should I refuse? We who serve genius must do our duty. Do come in.’
Charles, who was beginning to find her language a bit excessive, followed her up a couple of staircases to a dark sitting-room. It needn’t have been as dark as it was, but much of the window was obscured by an Art Deco glass fire-screen with a colourful design of a butterfly. The splashes of pale green, blue and red which the sun cast over the floor and furniture gave an ecclesiastical flavour to the room and this was intensified by the rows of photographs in ornate metal frames on the walls. They looked like images of saints and youthful miracle-workers, with their slicked hair and unearthly smiles. They were presumably the ‘little ones’, the pupils who had taken their theatrical orders under Miss da Costa’s guidance and gone on to work in the field.
Two untimely candles added to the stuffy atmosphere of Italian Catholicism which the room generated. Every surface was crowded with souvenirs, more tiny framed photographs, dolls, masks, gloves, programmes, massed untidily like offerings before a shrine.
The votaress sank dramatically into a small velvet chair and lay back so that the candle-light played gently over her fine profile. It reminded Charles of Spotlight photographs of ten years before, when every actor and actress was captured in a fuzzy light which picked out their bones in a murk of deepening shadows. (Nowadays actors tend to be photographed as if they’ve just come off a building site or are about to start life sentences for rape.) ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you want to ask me about Christopher.’
She didn’t ask for any credentials, which was a relief, because Charles hadn’t thought through the details of what Alfred Bostock was meant to be researching.
‘Yes, I’m after a bit of background, you know, what was he like as a child?’ Charles mentally practised his Alfred Bostock voice by repeating ‘Ford Cortina’, ‘double glazing’ and ‘ceiling tiles’ to himself.
‘Christopher came to me when he was ten.’ Ellen da Costa settled down to her recitation from Lives of the Saints. ‘Just a scrap of a boy, but with that same appealing charm and, of course, the talent. Even then, when he was unformed, the talent was there. Quite exceptional. His parents had died, in a car crash, I think, and it was an aunt who brought him to me. Very self-possessed he was.’
‘When was this that he first came to you?’
Ellen da Costa gave him a look for talking in prayers, but she answered his question, revealing that she had not been in on the shedding of four years considered necessary to the star’s career.
She then continued at some length describing the evolution of the embryo talent under the ideal laboratory conditions of her school. Charles was beginning to feel sated with superlatives when she offered to illustrate her lecture with a collection of press cuttings pasted into large blue ledgers.
They weren’t very revealing. One or two good notices for the young Christopher Milton, but nothing which suggested a performer set to take the world by storm. Charles mentioned this to Ellen da Costa in suitably reverential tones.
‘Ah well, the press has never been notorious for its recognition of true quality, particularly in the theatre. I once knew an actor.. ’ the pause was deliberately left long to summon up images of years of wild passion. ‘… a very great actor, who was nearly crucified by the critics. It was a martyrdom, a true martyrdom, very triste. Pardon my speaking so of your chosen occupation — ’ for a moment Charles couldn’t think what she was talking about — ‘but in my experience the press has never, in this country anyway, had the delicatesse to understand the workings of genius.’
Charles did not attempt to defend his assumed calling, but murmured something suitable. ‘Also,’ she continued, her finely modulated voice drawing out the final ‘o’ almost to breaking point, ‘perhaps Christopher was not fully realised at first. The potential was there, massive potential. Of course, with my experience I could see
